


Leandra Alphabet

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 10:39:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I decided to work backwards in Leandra's timeline.  Starting with the year after they first arrive in Kirkwall after the Blight. . . and stretching back twenty-six years to when Leandra and Malcolm first met.  Each chapter represents a moment from each year in that timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A is for Ansburg

“If only they’d never been invented.” Leandra murmurs in the milky light filtering across Gamlen’s bare stoop.  She holds the orphaned sock up to the clothesline and then drops her arm wearily.

Stretching her back, she considers simply throwing out all the socks.  How long before anyone might notice?  Marian and Carver prefer the perpetual rot and stink of the same pair day after day.  And Leandra isn’t in the habit of washing for Gamlen, or (outside of her overgrown children) any of Athenril’s band.  Whose sock _is_ this?

She turns it over.  Memory skates away from her, making her mouth thin.

“Is this?” She folds the long cuff down and traces a finger over the remains of an embroidered crest.  A sword and flame not unlike some she knew by heart, but different enough to spark a burning in her chest.

_“Circle mages have a tradition,” Malcolm says, fishing a scarlet wad from his satchel. “Of fighting oppression from within.” And the smile lingering beneath this new beard is one she has seen mostly in shadows.  In the shadow of the Chantry steps, or the shadow of a ballroom._

_“You stole socks?” She asks, sliding her hand across the seat of the buckboard to curl over his thigh.   Ansburg is never far from his mind, but always leagues from the tip of his tongue.  Leandra takes the red sock and pokes her thumbnail over the crest.  The stitches are bright, and perfectly executed. “What an inspiration you are, love.”_


	2. B is for Brother

As he gets smaller, figure diminishing past another set of Gallows gates, Leandra says a silent prayer for Gamlen.  And, with perhaps more urgency, another for all of them. _Maker, just a little opening.  Just a crack to let the light in. Please._

“I take it back,” says Marian, all stiff jaw and clenched knuckles. “He’s _not_ my favorite uncle.”

Beside her, Carver snorts, shielding his eyes from the midday sun.  Following his gaze, Leandra watches the guardsmen turn away more humanity.  They push away proffered bundles, and push away hopes.  They take unsure, Ferelden shoulders and rotate them ungently from the blinding white glare of the Gallows back to the sea. 

After three days, Leandra’s legs haven’t adjusted to firm ground.  If that’s even what Kirkwall is. 

“I thank you, again.”  Aveline speaks behind her.  She looks to Gamlen’s empty spot on the stairs and swings her bright head back to Leandra. “To be a burden. . .”

“Nonsense.  We’re more than a couple of pungent boat-mates now.”  Leandra tries not to make a show of tucking Aveline’s sweaty hair behind her ear.  It’s Gamlen she can’t stop seeing, one version superimposed upon the other.  A brother in Orlesian finery, and an old man wearing his failures on his face like chimney soot.  Her fingers reach out and catch under Aveline’s elbow, and they start toward their makeshift camp.  “We’re family.  Look around. It’s more than most people have left.”

“If that’s the case, may I say your brother-”

“I know.” Leandra stops her, stops short of a smile as she glances back at Marian and Carver, and drops her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.  “Bit of a tit, isn’t he?”


	3. C is for Curiosity

“How are things on the ‘stead, Lea?” asks Danal.

Leandra finds the crisp tang of the cider pleasant in her nose.  But she doesn’t drink from the overlarge tankard he’s offered. Instead, she places a hand-tied bundle on the bar just behind it.

“Things are as usual, I suppose.”  She lifts an eyebrow, and Danal looks around the tavern. Templars in casual dress sit in the corner.  Leandra doesn’t have to look.  It’s all in the twitch of the barkeep’s mustache, and the gnarled hand he places over the bundle.

“There are curious folk about.  Soldiers mostly, warning about a Blight.”  His voice and his rag cover the soft squall of coins as he takes the bundle off the bar, dropping it in the pocket of his damp apron. 

“A Blight?  Maker preserve us.”  Concern sharpens her voice, but she’s thinking of all the little squares of cloth that Malcolm cut for her.  The shears had been too much for him by that time, but he had insisted. Uneven and threadbare, the stack of cloth had carried coins for two years.  Then she’d had to cut her own.  Leandra touches her throat, gazing at the man behind the bar. “Do let me know if you hear anything else. . .about the Blight.”

“You don’t have to-” Danal clears his throat, tapping the bar with the cracking skin of his knuckles.  His eyes flick down to his apron pocket.  “Not any more.”

“Yes, I do.”  Leandra doesn’t follow his gaze, only waits for him to stop shifting.  It occurs to her, as she pushes through the Dane’s heavy door, she wouldn’t know how to take the coins back even if she wanted to. 


	4. D is for Drunk

Staring into her cup, Leandra thinks this feeling is entirely unsafe.  She takes a deep sip anyway, pulling clear, white heat into her throat. Drinking scrapes away all the protective layers, even the loving ones.

But, on this day Marian had plunked the bottle down with intimidating purpose.   _To the fallen_ , she had said, pouring until the bottle was empty enough to be filled with all the necessary memories from loosened tongues. The fallen, and the falling.  Leandra sips again, rubbing the rasp of the cup against her lip.  _How do we plummet so endlessly over the span of a year, love?_

“Well?” Marian asks. “Out of fashion, perhaps.  But I could get used to these.”  Her savvy, sandpaper voice makes Leandra blink away the blur.  When she looks up, Orlesian robes meet her eyes; magenta, blue, and white in a sagging pastiche over her daughter’s frame.  Marian is tall and broad.  But, she’ll never fill these robes and, knowing her, never forget that she can’t.  So Leandra’s gaze lingers on the swirled silver pauldrons sliding down where they should rest high.  She stands, unsteady and still clutching her cup half-full of unsafe truths, and runs a hand over the musty shoulders and the loose clasps at the front of Malcolm’s bequest

“They won’t ever fit you properly.”  The words are a sigh, and Leandra doesn’t shrink from Marian’s flash of despair, or the way her eyes flick to Carver and Bethany when they look away.  Leaning over Dog, Leandra plucks Malcolm’s staff from beside the hearth.  Her head swims as she presses it into Marian’s heated grasp.  For a moment, their fingers tighten over one another like the weighty, wet coils of a mooring line, “But this _always_ will.”


	5. E is for Exhale

After a week, when Ferelden’s interminable wetness can no longer be denied, when each day turns greyer where it overlaps on the last, they burn Malcolm with magic.  His daughters force their legacy into the swollen, unwilling wood, and Leandra watches with her ankles aching in the mud.

It takes all day.  And it takes everything they have.  Dusk is only discernable by its swift chill and the tinge of purple on the horizon, as if the sun had wanted to show itself like a late-comer, and decided better of it at the last moment.

“Keep going.” Her voice is heavy, mechanical.  Marian and Bethany share a look before the elder teases a vial of lyrium from her hip with charred fingers and passes it to her sister.  Filth and exhaustion cover them like a film, and Leandra doesn’t care.

Each of them had performed some ritualistic torture this day.  Leandra washed and dressed the wasted body.  Carver built the pyre, stocking it with what little dry kindling they scraped together, and hefted his father’s remains onto the structure.

Silhouetted by paltry flame and too much gasping smoke, her daughters don’t hunch or complain.  They turn back to their task, and damp wood whines loudly under the renewed fire, exhaling greenish Fade vapor against the blackening curtain of night.

Anger chokes everything.  Silky soot turned to the mud of outrage in her throat; hatred for the country itself and the damp cold, hatred for injustice, disgust for the mute sorrow of her children, anger for Malcolm and for this solitude.

Carver cradles her back, bringing heavy, matted furs around her shoulders despite her rigidity.  Dimly, she recognizes a beating heart there, and a burning cheek pressing its tears against her temple.  But Leandra feels none of it, and keeps the fetid air imprisoned in her chest for as long as she can stand it.


	6. F is for Fleas

“Maker’s bloody cock!” Carver growls, swatting at his bare forearm.

“Carver!” A lilting chorus of a scold issues from Leandra and Bethany.

“Can’t you do something about the blighted fleas?” he mutters, swinging his head between Bethany at the desk and the father-shaped lump sitting on the big bed in the corner. Leandra watches her husband rub his beard with yellowed nails, smiling as Carver continues. “What good is having three mages under one roof if we can’t even get rid of household pests?”

“We tried, but you kept coming back.” Marian’s voice is soft over its casual burn.  Neither she nor the mabari look up.  At Leandra’s feet beside the fire, Marian devours her father’s grimoire, stained fingertips twitching to memorize.

“They don’t seem to bother me,” offers Malcolm before the inevitable snarling between his children begins.  He tries to settle himself higher against the headboard and gives up, chest heaving under the effort.  “I guess my blood’s not tasty enough any more.  That’s a good sign.”   When he laughs, it’s a shadow of its former sound. He gazes at Leandra, winking, and clears his throat.




“Did you know that fleas were the first creatures outside the Deep Roads to be infected by the taint?” His voice pulls from a deeper, louder reserve, and Carver looks over at him.  Malcolm nods, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.  The hands that clasp over the living remains of his chest remind Leandra of birch sticks piled together.  “It all started with fleas.  They spread like a plague across the Wilds, biting anything with too much hair.  That’s where we get blight wolves, Bereskarns, and those giant, corrupted spiders.”

Carver gulps and Leandra can hear it over the snap of the hearth.  “Giant _h-hairy_ spiders?”

Malcolm nods again, eyes still closed.  She can see the twitch of his lips, the color of humor lighting his face where the fire touches it.  It’s everything she will miss; her sanctum and her joy clothed in strange, crepey skin.  When he cracks his eye open to look at Carver, Leandra bursts out laughing despite the pangs gathering in her throat.  Her hand goes to her mouth, but it’s too late.  Malcolm roars and Marian cackles, and even Bethany gives over a husky chuckle.

Carver turns his sudden scowl downward, cheeks blooming a deeper shade of his normal indignation.  Through the blur of her laughter, Leandra watches her son cast his eyes to Malcolm and battle back a smile.  As his jaw jumps, she absently wonders if he’ll ever grow a beard of his own now.


	7. G is for Golden

Privacy is a luxury they have learned to steal as wantonly as their freedom. Sometimes they have the cheek to force the children out of the house for an hour.  Malcolm’s favorite thing is to start by opening his shirt, yanking it out of his trousers, counting how many buttons before Marian and the twins bolt from the cottage.  Because what comes next is so much worse for them than watching their parents simply kiss.

But sometimes it’s easier for Leandra and Malcolm to be the ones to leave.

Even with strength leaving him in waves every day, he asks for a walk with her.  And she can only say yes to everything he would ask until he couldn’t ask it any longer. . .and probably long after that.  So Leandra notches her shoulder under his, heavy wool blanket clasped under her arm, and they walk into the glade beyond the hill.

The grass is dry and the ground is firm, and Leandra watches the shadow of her body move across Malcolm’s face beneath her; now in dark, now in the sun’s full light, and back again as she sighs through the honeyed warmth of motion.

Afterward, nimble fingers tease her hair from its knot and spread the pale mass on the blanket between them.

“Love, how did we manage not a single blonde child?” His eyes travel the streaks of white on gold, across the blanket to her waiting face. 

“The Maker favors you.”  She smiles, briefly sucking the thumb he sweeps over her lips.  “I know the feeling well.”


	8. H is for Hawke

“Mother?”

Leandra looks down at Bethany’s pallid face in her lap.  The fever is gone, and the morning’s broth has yet to join the evening’s bread in the chamber pot.  So that’s good.  She lays aside her book and caresses her daughter’s damp hair around the shell of one pinkish ear.

“What is it?  Water?”

“You’re not a Hawke, are you?  Not really.”  Bethany murmurs, eyes drifting to glass and then closing.  She hitches a rocky sigh deep in her chest, coughing.  “It’s not fair.”

“Life is a game you must play as if all the world cheats.”  Her voice sounds so much like her father’s that Leandra smiles in spite of the tangled picture it makes.  Outside, she can hear Carver’s sword whistling, and the patient instruction from Malcolm.  What are the rules of men against the hum of love on her lips each night, or the name-day gifts wrapped in a child’s clumsy frippery?

“But, the Chantry won’t . . . ” Bethany starts, as if continuing an argument from a dream, and then goes quiet as Leandra chuckles, body jerking softly.

“Maker knows I am more Hawke than any of you.”  A choice can be as strong as a birthright.  It’s the masked ball she thinks of, and Malcolm’s pointed halla horns quivering at their tips when she’s done speaking over the bounding pomp of the remigold.  Leandra had become more than Amell, then, when she laid aside all their shared subterfuge to give him a plain affirmative.  One that split his face with a grin.

Beyond the cottage door, Carver yelps, and it’s followed by the grunt of stifled laughter.  Leandra teases cool fingers across Bethany’s worry lines.  “You were born to be a Hawke.  I think I was, too.”


	9. I is for Indigent

“Carver, will you show the gentleman to the shed?”  Malcolm pushes his son toward the stooped elf.  Carver looks back at his mother and Malcolm continues, “You two can start with the cows and see how it goes.”

From the doorway, Leandra looks over Marian’s shoulder to see the two figures sawing their legs through the switchgrass toward the outbuilding; Carver’s heavy arms swinging, the old elf keeping pace with quick steps and his hands in his pockets.  He wears twin braids in the ashy fall of his thinning hair, and his trousers are mostly the patches of a least a dozen other clothes.

Before they are out of earshot, her daughter blurts, “Are we the Chantry now?  Shall I post a board beside the door?”

The elf does not look back.  Carver does, though, and Leandra is achingly proud of how his face echoes her own.  She hooks a finger under Marian’s collar and yanks her backwards through the doorway.

“You have a choice.”  Leandra’s voice is loud, pitched into the relative dimness of the cottage.  Marian scuttles back against the bed, face like poppy, red and beautiful and darkening at its center.  “Help me with the meal we’re going to offer that man when he’s done his work.  Or go to the Chanter’s board and pick the first thing you see.”

Eighteen years of stormfront gather in Marian’s eyes.  Without a word, she muscles into her duster, pushing past Leandra into the faded edge of morning beyond the door.  They barely look at one another, father and daughter, as their too-similar forms reflect and pass on the pathway.  Leandra watches Malcolm cross his arms and gaze after the girl, tall and recalcitrant, framed by yellowed grass and grey sky.


	10. J is for Junk

“Please don’t make me ask you again.  Clear it out, or I’ll do it for you.”  Leandra rubs the bridge of her nose, staring down past Marian’s folded arms into the open trunk.  “At least throw out the moldiest things?”

“They aren’t _moldy._ ”  Comes the retort.  And the girl squats protectively over her collected treasures.  She twirls a soggy feather between her fingers. “Okay, maybe some of them are.”

As she digs through six years of mysterious items, Leandra realizes that almost everything Marian has kept is some trinket from the twins.  When he was seven, Carver had thought it funny to break the monotony of wagon travel by wrapping his older sister’s head in a moth-eaten scarf while she slept.  He had neglected to shake out the various residents of the scarf before doing so.  Since then, he’d delivered her no less than ten similar items, smirking when Marian took each one and shoved him, scowling.  Yet, he always missed the moment when she folded them gingerly into the trunk.  Leandra shivers.  Which spider-infested barrels had her son pulled them from in the first place?

At her feet, Marian sets aside a whole pile of colored glass.  Some of it is from the riverbed, edges worn as smooth as skipping stones.  She separates the bottles, items with such obvious signs of Bethany etched into their very character.  Blue and green and milky-pale.  Marian holds up the best of them, stoppered with the ill-fitting cork of a mead jug, and turns it slowly in the light.  Pure, white sand rolls like iridescent shorebreakers within the glass.

As Marian reaches the bottom of the trunk, Leandra can’t help but laugh suddenly.  Quick and harsh.  Before her daughter can inquire about the wrapped objects she’s hefting from the depths of the trunk, Leandra takes them from her.  There, swaddled in cotton and tied with ribbon, is the undeniable beginning of her family’s obsession with junk.

“Are those. . .masks?”  Marian’s nose scrunches as she cocks her head.  “What happened to that one?”

Leandra holds the broken pieces of the halla mask together in the window, watching the empty eyes go bright with sunlight.  “Oh, darling.  I’m fairly certain that’s a story you don’t want to hear.”


	11. K is for Kennel

They are speaking Orlesian.  The two gentlemen, with their pointed beards and pointed remarks, glance over their shoulders at Lothering’s residents crowded around them at the merchant’s counter.

“ _Must their love of dogs extend to smelling like them?_ ” The shorter of the two speaks with a valley accent, and the crest on his ridiculous cape is of a house she’s never heard of.  Though Leandra supposes it’s been too many years to count on the faded pattern of her memory where Aristide’s lineage charts are concerned.

His taller companion grimaces in commiseration, eyes flicking over Leandra, Carver and Bethany before commenting, “ _I suppose that happens when every one of them sleeps in the same box._ ”

Carver whines when Leandra squeezes his hand too tightly.  What the man means to say is _kennel_ , of course.  But there’s not a suitable Orlesian substitute.  Regardless of the misused noun, she can feel her color rise.  But Malcolm’s head dips beside her, sending a shiver from the little hairs alongside her ear all the way to her toes.

“Do you think it’s better to smell like a dog, or like a cheese that’s growing hair?”  The sound of it is serious, contemplative.   But the nibbling kiss at her ear is not.




As Leandra stifles a groan she sees Bethany give the two men a cock of her head.  The she shakes her heavy braids, deciding on something. 

“No, not cheese.”  She speaks loudly, voice careful and sweet.  Many of the shoppers, their friends and neighbors, turn to look at the girl’s serene face.  “They smell like teat-rot.”

Nobody covers their laughter, Ferelden shoulders shaking impolitely under beards and dark curls.  Leandra feels Carver squeeze her hand right back.


	12. L is for Lacerate

He thinks it’s dragonweed, which tastes a little spicy and sweet when you gnaw on the stalk.  But it’s not.  It’s rashweed.  And this version of Gamlen only ever gets the weed part right.  She watches the puff of sickly dust where he yanks the plant.  When he starts to scratch, and writhe, and eventually throw himself on the flagstones, Leandra only stares.  There is a muteness about her that’s disconcerting.  That she’s aware of her own unmovable face, the lack of titters or soft clucking in her throat, is all the clue she needs.

The dream is unfinished at its edges. 

A courtyard where there should be a bench for mother, and a sunny spot for the cat father insists he’s not feeding every day. . .only melts to white, and other dreams shift disconsolately in their vapor while they wait to replace this lost moment.  Leandra can hear them; owls that might be the orders of Templars calling overheard as she burrows in a bedroll, snores that might be Malcolm’s in the un-space between her dream and the pillow that holds it in. 

Just below the lacy scallop of her hem, Leandra watches young Gamlen’s wrist scraping over stone.  His mouth works the syllables of pain, like a fish gulping air in memory of water, and she wishes she could hear it. But there is no sound for the bright beginnings of blood on his abraded skin.


	13. M is for Mabari

The weight of the honey rolls in the basket had been so different from this weight.  The weight of a puppy.  And where one resided, unmoving until delivered, the other tumbles and sniffs and squeaks among the crumbs, hidden by the kitchen towel.

Leandra pauses, hand on the door, and listens to her family within. 

They will love this dog with everything they have until the day it dies.  She suddenly feels as if she’s bringing something awful home.  In her limited history with animals, Leandra knows enough to feel the how steadily the weight of an impending sadness can creep over one’s judgment.  But the heartbeats beneath warm fur, stretching across the years ahead, drown her coarser nature.  She pulls back the towel to check on the mabari.

Instantly, he gnaws on her fingers.  And just as soon, he stops, eyes closing in sudden exhaustion, and an expansive yawn emanates from the cradle of the basket.  Leandra doesn’t smile, exactly.  The creature needn’t be covered in kaddis, needn’t be trained to protect, and needn’t understand any command greater than those kept deep in any dog’s heart.  These will be, she knows, utterances of a purer language, one that knows no word for distrust or abandonment. 

Leandra passes her fingertips over the stubby ears and the wrinkled puppy fat.  Inside the cottage, Marian laughs, and the dog perks to attention with a delicate whine building in its throat.

“Very well,” whispers Leandra.  She lifts the basket a little higher, regarding the puppy as it regards her with brown marble eyes and lifted brows.  “For as long as you are able . . .make them happy.”

And he doesn’t nip at her nose when she presses a kiss to his round head.

The door gives under her push, and three faces turn.

“I have a surprise.” She says, showing the basket’s contents.  And when she smiles, it feels oddly like a dog’s smile.  Boundless.


End file.
